Sunday, February 26, 2012

This week I struggled and may have
spent more time writing -- and not writing-- my review of The Sense of an
Ending by Julian Barnes. How do I spend time not writing? Solitaire,
Pinterest,Facebook, the news.I sit at the computer and do everything but
write.The Sense of an Ending.What
a good book. It was so tiny, so worthwhile and so hard to get my head around. A book to think about. It won last year’s Man
Booker prize.

So next up for review is Jussi-Adler Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes. I go back to page-turning mysteries
after read-me-twice dense literary fiction.I enjoyed Keeper, mostly for
the interaction between the two crime solvers. Not so much for the plot, though
I admired how it worked, and the way it played with themes of suicide and
pressure. But, this was another one of
those thrillers where I felt the possible movie version hovering over my
shoulder as I read. I’m not sure how I feel about books that seem to be written
with a movie in mind. Sometimes it adds; sometimes it takes away. In Keeper, it’s a toss up.

No wonder I
like his books. He loves what I love: Elmore Leonard’s works and the current
television drama Justified.I get gleeful reading Leonard – and have going
back many years. The characters and dialogue of Justified make me laugh and smile. After reading Nesbo’s interview,
I’m going to start watching early seasons of Breaking Bad.

As for reading, I received The
Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier from Amazon this week. It’s now out in
paperback.My friend Mike suggested I
read it and write about it. Also in the stack of possibilities are Mr. g by Alan Lightman – but I will
likely sandwich a mystery of some kind in before I take that on.

Finally, I’m feeling the need to reorganize my blog. I want to learn more
about the mechanics of blogging – inserting pictures, ‘designing’ pages insofar
as that is possible. I just changed the top picture and I while I’m fond of
this photo, I’d rather it were about one quarter the size. I don’t know how to do that. I’m in desperate need of a gaggle of teenage
geeks to serve as computer advisers for me. My brother-in-law is coming this
week to visit and though he has gray streaks in his hair and doesn’t blog,
tweet or text to my knowledge, he may serve as a good substitute for the teens
– he has the computer skills we don’t. Welcome George.

For blog readers: The Sunday Salon is a group site for book
bloggers on Facebook.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending begins with a sense of the beginnings.

Splashes of
(mostly) watery images dapple the first page, before Tony Webster, the
narrator, launches into a discussion about the wavelike malleability of time in
a life – how it can slow down, speed up and even disappear.

Tony, in his waning years with most of a very ordinary life behind him, looks
back. He says he will relate “a few incidents that have grown to anecdotes, to
some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.” And so he begins
his personal history, part memoir, part coming of age story. His mythology will,
in a mere 160 pages, be challenged,
debunked and reversed by unforeseen events so dramatic that the reader will be
left reassessing, even recoiling from the self-serving explanations of this
intellectual prig.

But
I am ahead of myself. Tony narrates his story, waxing on in an initially inviting
voice about a band of schoolboys, chums full of themselves and ideas: “We were
book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic… If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein,
Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley;
Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky.” They wear their watches on the inside of their
wrists as a symbol of their unity and call up the clique’s refrain, “That’s
philosophically self-evident,” whenever applicable.

Tony is not without intellectual charm, but Adrian outshines them all
stunning a teacher with his explanations of what is history. When a peer
commits suicide after getting a girl pregnant, Adrian finds the event an
occasion for philosophical analysis. He
quotes, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections
of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” He applies it, speculating
on a note left behind by the deceased.Adrian also cites Camus’ existential ideas about suicide and choice.

Such
theory of philosophy, history and literature full of “eros and thanatos”
dominate the boys’ thoughts and delights, though when they look at their
parents’ dull lives, they “fear that life wouldn’t turn out like literature.” Intellectually
cocksure and heady, they are virginal innocents with no experience, sexual or
otherwise, to anchor their opinions.

The band dissolves. The boys become men and the high-brow discussions of
their adolescence on love and death, literature and personal history play out
in real, rather than theoretical, ways.

Tony starts “going
out” (he explains what this meant in his day) with Veronica. He details the
era’s bumbling and groping mutual sexual stimulation, far short of “full sex.”
Most people, he tells us “didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies.
Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing
the fifties – or in my case both decades side by side.” His love life proceeds on track until he is
invited to meet the parents. The disappointing and humiliating weekend – a
beginning of the end -- is followed some
time later by a nasty break up with recriminations over sex and love.

In the midst
of the break-up that Tony inserts a seemingly unrelated description of the most
powerful natural occurrence he witnessed during his school days – an image that
will come to dominate his remembrance of that time. The Severn Bore, like the
Bay of Fundy, displays a tidal river’s periodic dramatic reversal of the direction
of water flow. “It was more unsettling
because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the
universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was
reversed, and time with it.”

After the break up, time passes and Tony gets a letter from Adrian letting
him know that he is seeing Veronica. Tony responds in a letter he sums up and
dismisses in a short paragraph.And then
because he thinks of himself as “peaceable” and given to “self-preservation” he
“successfully puts Veronica out of his mind, out of his history.”Career, marriage, a child, divorce,
grandchildren and retirement ensue.

If Part One concludes with Tony leading a dull, less than
literature-worthy existence, Part Two reverses the course of the novel when those
formative events flood back into his life.Tony is bequeathed a small sum along with some documents that bring him
back to his mutual history with Veronica and Adrian.

Events will lead him to posit this question, a question fraught with
irony given the outcome:

“For years
you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press
a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out.
The events reconfirm the emotions – resentment, a sense of injustice, relief
–and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is
closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be a
contradiction.But what if, even at a
late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change?”

The Sense of
an Ending is a small book that seems big.plays against one of the major works of criticism of the book’s era,
Frank Kermode’s The Sense of An Ending, a work published in that discusses, like Barnes’ novel,man’s relationship to time,the concordance of beginnings and
endingsand fiction’s role in history
and mythology.

Though the novel examines themes of philosophy, history, and literary
criticism, it may be most interesting as a tightly woven study of psychological
change.It calls to mind recent work by
narrative psychologists, who explore the way narratives shape the self, as well
as how the self shapes narrative in order to “self preserve.”

And it serves as an example in the
current psychological emphasis on emotional intelligence. Though Tony seems an affable story teller at
the start, as he proceeds, the reader’s distrust builds. Tony’s not just
unreliable, he’s numb, smug and pushy. Repeatedly, Veronica tells him: “You
just don’t get it.”

He doesn’t. Nor do we. For he is our filter.

And then he does – as do we. The sense we are left with is revulsion.In Barnes’ book not only does the main
character change over the course of the story, but the reader changes her
relation to the narrator.For all the intellectual arguing, it is sense
we are left with at book’s end.

Julian Barnes has achieved a remarkable feat. Adolescence is regarded as
the time when the core sense of self forms, one that’s often difficult to
change. Barnes has both illustrated and inverted
this process. The final irony may be that by the telling’s end nothing about
Tony’s self has changed – and everything has.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

New to the waters of the Facebook group, Sunday Salon, I am wading –getting my toes wet.I admire the ease with which others engage in
casual book talk in the Salon, and find I am often more comfortable writing something
a little more formal – not quite a full essay but a little more than
conversation with friends. So I’m trying something a little more chatty. I am slow and getting slower it seems.It has taken me a little more than six months
to figure out how to find blogs I like to read and I still don’t have it down. Apart from loyal friends, family and a handful
of new acquaintances, I haven’t a clue as to who reads mine. Audience. How do
you know who your readers are? And how does that shape your writing?It all seems so random. Years ago, I read a farewell letter from the publisher and
founder of a great, issues-driven alternative newspaper. He was leaving the
paper, he said, because he no longer knew who his readers were. That made sense
to me. One of the first rules of writing, I had been taught, was know your
audience. But when I began blogging I told myself audience didn’t
matter. I would just write and see what happened. That hasn’t quite worked
either. I’m still confused and tentative. It doesn’t help that on many days my
stats tell me I have more hits from the Netherlands than from the U.S. Maybe it’s
all the Nordic Noir I have been writing about.

Last week I struggled with my writing. I completed a piece
on Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, a
book I very much liked.I also finished
Julian Barnes The Sense of An Ending,
another great book that will likely take me some time to think and write about,
my self-imposed assignment for this week. So given that labor, I decided to switch from literary
fiction, back to more page-turning Nordic Noir. I’ve just begun Jussi
Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Dirt poor, motherless and pregnant, 15- year-old Esch,
tells the story of her family in the 12 days leading up to and through
Hurricane Katrina, a storm that blasts her Mississippi home. Jesmyn Ward’s
heroine in Salvage the Bones inhabits
a vibrant, violent, ramshackle world.

Esch’s mother died in childbirth leaving her the lone
female in a family of men full of desperation and desires. When Dad isn’t
nursing the loss of his wife with alcohol, he focuses on natural disasters –
last year it was tornados, this year it’s the storms brewing in the Gulf. He battens
down the house and attends to his truck, hoping not just to survive but to make
money using the truck to do odd jobs after the hurricane. As he hunkers down,
his distracted boys hanker to save themselves each in his way. Athletic Randall
focuses on an upcoming basketball game where he could earn a scholarship to basketball
camp and then be noticed by scouts. Skeeter cares for his pitbull, China, a
champion in local dog fights, and her litter of pups which Skeeter can sell for
enough money to provide for everyone. Tagalong Junior alternately wants to be a
part of the action or cling to family members like the life rafts they are.

And then there’s Esch whose currency is her body, a
body she’s freely given to any of her brothers’ friends who’s wanted it until
she fell deeply in love with Manny, the father of the child she discovers she’s
carrying. Problem is 19-year-old Manny’s also got another love interest, the lovelier, lighter-skinned,
less available Shaliyah.

Sex isn’t the only way Esch opens her body. She’s
acutely attuned to what her world looks like, sounds like, feels like, tastes
like and smells like. Jessmyn Ward precedes the novel with three quotes. One,
from the poem “Now” by Gloria Fuertes reads:

For though I’m
small, I know many things,

And
my body is an endless eye

Through which,
unfortunately, I see everything.”

Fortunately for the reader Esch’s body takes it all in
–birthing; dogfights; man fights; farm accidents; thefts; skinny dipping; pregnancy;
hunger; Vienna sausages and potted meat; roasted squirrel; the woods and the
fields that surround her home; the scooped out pit full of husks of cars, appliances and an old RV; the skeleton
of a nearby house where her grandparents once lived in better days, a house now
reduced to scrap they salvage.

Esch describes her world with visceral vision,
blending an artist’s eye and poet’s ear with gut responses, transforming what
her body tells her into yearning, descriptive language. At times, the reader
feels as if we are looking over her shoulder as she sketches line after line showing
the muscles of her brothers, bodies in motion, hunger, sweat, and attitudes.

Her language lunges into metaphor, sometimes
imperfectly, sometimes achingly beautifully. Wave after wave of sensual
description flows, similes made of simple objects are rendered so forcefully
that the reader’s mind may wander to beyond Esch’s reaching grasp to Ward’s
careful crafting.

Some examples:

“Manny threw a
basketball from hand to hand. Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and
my heart unfurled to fly.” (page 5)

“Manny’s face was
smooth and only his body spoke: his muscles jabbered like chickens.”(page 11)

“My eyes wanted to
search for Manny so badly the want felt like an itch on my temple, but I kept
walking.” (page 14)

“I can’t remember
exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak
trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue,
no banana yellow. P 22 (Just what color is forsythia blue?)” (page 22)

“Randall lets Junior go, and Junior hangs on
until he can’t anymore, until his legs turn to noodles and he is sliding down
Randall like a pole.” (page 43)

“Junior folds his
arms over his chest, his ribs like a small grill burnt black.” (page 44)

“We fall into a
pace. My face feels tight and hot, and the air coming into my nose feels like
water. I am swimming through the air.” (page 66)

“Daddy is wiggling from underneath the truck.
It bulks over him like the rest of the detritus in the yard: refrigerators rusted
so that they look like deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, pieces of engines,
a washing machine so old it has an arm that swished the clothes around and
looks like a handheld cake mixer.” (page
89)

“Sometimes I
wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the
memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeeze
through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present
day, his sand holes, his shirtless bird chest, Randall yelling at him: his
present washed clean of memory like vegetables washed clean of the dirt they
grow in. “(page 91)

If Esch seems
precocious in her use of figurative language and vocabulary – using words such
as desultory, indolently, opaque and detritus -- words beyond
the average range of most 15 year-olds --, it may be because she reads. Her
English teacher, Mrs. Dedeaux (who shares a last name with Jesmyn Ward’s
brother Joshua to whom the book is dedicated) has assigned summer reading. Last
year it was Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
This year it’s Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
Esch connects most directly to the story of Medea and Jason; their myth foils the
multiple lover and mother roles she contemplates.

There’s her own lovers’ triangle with Manny choosing coy
Shaliyah over Esch after Esch has given him everything.

China sets an example by resembling Medea when she’s
fighting the father of her litter or tending to her pups. China’s also fiercely
loved by Skeeter, who will do almost anything for her, defying, competing with
Dad for resources and even stealing in order to provide for his dog and her
pups. In turn, Skeeter, who often seems more attuned to his animals than humans,
is closest to Esch and knows her best.

Esch also sees a likeness to Medea in one version of
Mother Nature, the wrathful Katrina.

The remembered presence of her mother provides an
alternative model of how to be female. Esch recalls the way she gathered eggs,
attracted Dad, killed chickens, fished and cooked shark, danced and even gave
birth.These memory remnants reveal a
happier, more stable and civilized past, particularly when her grandparents
still lived on and farmed the land.

Ward’s book does not rest on character and description
alone. Each chapter, each day, brings its own arc -- a crisis, a violent episode,
an adventure or a revelation. There’s a lot of blood, several wounds – some only
nicks, others requiring more healing. When
Katrina finally hits, the whole rises to a riveting climax followed by a sweet
and hopeful denouement.

While Esch may compare her life to ancient Greek
myths, my mind wanders to more American archtypes. Esch, the marginalized child
of a struggling drunk, has a voice with echoes of an all-American literary
hero. Like Huck Finn, she just a kid full of pluck, with a virtuous heart, gritty
integrityandfolksy narrative skills. Whereas his is a quintessentially
American male adventure tale -- men and boys
running away from mothers and wives, hers is female, the domestic adventure of
women and mothers settling and civilizing among men. Perhaps Mrs. Dedeaux will assign Mark Twain’s s great
American novel for summer reading next year so Esch can find her own
similarities.

Note: This is the first book I have chosen to read
because of a blog review.Luke reviewed
the book on Basso Profundo, in a shorter, pithier rave than this. Salvage the Bones also won the 2011
National Book Award for fiction, an award that seems to most often parallel my
literary fiction reading tastes.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Reading draws me closer to my
most centered, sacred self. I read to escape. I read to connect.

I
open the book’s cover, turn a page and
whoosh, I leave quotidian clutter – dusty
floors, dirty dishes, bills and bank
account balances. I don’t see laundry, clutter or what my husband calls my nest
– the thatching of books, papers and blankets that surround me. I forget about politics,
people who annoy me, things I said butwish I didn’t, things I should havesaid but didn’t and stories that
run through my head. I barely hear the
television, phone or my husband asking me how to spell a word. Like the girl in
the bubble, I am (almost) impervious to infectious interruptions and real-life distractions.

Like
Max in Where the Wild Things Are, I
watch a new world grow around me. I enter wholeheartedly. I bound off, take
sail.

In
his Biographia Literaria Samuel
Taylor Coleridge describes this as “the willing suspension of disbelief for the
moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” For me there is little willing; it just
happens – and lasts more than moments. Since adolescence, poetic faith has often come
easier than religious faith. Put another
way, it is easier suspend disbelief in a good book than in many churches I’ve attended.
There is often some niggling part of the canon or the doctrine that gets in the
way of God. But a church isn’t God, and a book isn’t always fictive or
non-fictive truth.

Sometimes, doubt creeps in as I
read. I speed ahead, move on or dwell on my unwillingness to go with the book’s
flow. The last action sends me directly into my thinking head. I’m dwelling on a
book, rather than a person or idea that annoys me. Same bad loop, different
target.

This
happened recently. When asked “What do you want for Christmas?,” I thought book, then whatbook? I picked from a
list of a best books, a book that was getting lots of hoopla and notable
endorsements, a book I knew little about.

I read the whole thing. Now, I know too much.I started to brood and write about all my
reasons for disliking this book when I realized I had misplaced antagonism. It
wasn’t the book that irritated me as much as the marketing. I took a page from a
character in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s
Table, one of my new favorite books. Miss Lasqueti reads crime novels from
the deck chair of an ocean liner and when she doesn’t care for them, she flings
them overboard. I love that gesture. And
so I mentally tossed out this work of highly touted literary fiction and watched
it sink into the deep blue sea.

My ease in practicing poetic faith leads me to better understand
the other kind, and I make those leaps too.Reading is high up on the spiral inward as I imagine it, somewhere less
drifty than daydreaming, but more active than the states described in the
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: Pratyahara,
a withdrawal/control the senses, Dharana – one pointed focus or concentration
and Dhyana:a state of meditation.

I wonder if neuroscientists stuck electrodes all over my head while I
read what they might learn about my suspended state. In the last few days news
out of UCC Berkeley describes how it’s possible to decode single heard words,
news that has led to “mind-reading” headlines, headlines then cleverly debunked
in the first paragraph as well, not really mind reading but getting
closer.I most like the LA Times
description of it as mind listening or eavesdropping.(For those interested in the science here’s a link to the paper by Brian
Pasley, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley and lead author of the
"Reconstructing Speech From Human Auditory Cortex," www.plosbiology.org/home.action;jsessionid=F6204EAE7CA5D03F83C4BC791EBEEFDD) Google mind reading in news for various reports of the story.So
far, says the LA Times, “the researchers’ brain code allows them to translate
only words that the brain actually hears, not words that the brain thinks up on
its own.”If journalists can imagine this as a step towards mind reading, it’s less
of a leap for me to imagine scientists reading the story in my mind as I read
it on the page. Questions: Would it be a different story? Would it record backtracking, interpreting,
connecting and niggling?What would
flinging the book overboard look like to electrode readers? Finally, would it
record the kind of serenity described as a quality in another character in Ondaatje’s
in The Cat’s Table?The narrator
Michael describes a reader:

Mr. Fonseka seemed to draw forth an assurance of a calming quality from
the books he read. He’d gaze into an unimaginable distance (one could almost
see the dates flying off the calendar) and quote lines written in stone or
papyrus. …..Mr. Fonseka would not be a wealthy man. And it would be a spare
life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But
he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And
this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of
books close by.”

I
surround myself with stacks. I helmet my head with words. I cover my heart with
the armour of books.